


To end the one of us

by Lilliburlero



Series: Rare Accidents [2]
Category: Purposes of Love - Mary Renault, Return to Night - Mary Renault, The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Comment Fic, Consent Issues, Crossover, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Mid-Canon, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, References to Shakespeare, Shakespeare Quotations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 10:15:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2384684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chapter 1.5 of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1555346/chapters/3296636">Rare Accidents</a>.  Written to Naraht's request for something set 15 minutes after the close of  Chapter 1 of that fic. </p><p>In which there is definitely no shortsword duel over the lighting desk of Lynchwyck Parish Hall, and nor does anything spontaneously combust. There is, however, a melodramatic swoon.</p><p>The title is from <i>Henry IV Part One</i>, 5, iv.</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: contains fairly extensive and uneuphemistic reference to (canonical) underage and dubiously consensual sex, excuse made for same by a sympathetic character; references to rape; homophobic language and attitudes; misogynistic language and attitudes; references to drug and alcohol abuse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To end the one of us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/gifts).



It was a pity about the eczema, Ralph thought, because Julian Fleming had probably the finest cranio-facial structure he had ever seen—and then he realised that it was makeup, a very nifty arrangement with some shreds of medical strapping, brown and purple greasepaint, which contrived to look much more _inflamed_ , even under normal lighting, than should red and pink. That air of gauche lassitude wouldn't come off with cold-cream though—Ralph checked himself before he quite formulated a thought that had its expression from the lower decks, but its content from generations of flintily Nonconformist Rosses: _soft fucking bastard, never done a day's hard graft..._  

'Come and meet the cast—'

Ralph was startled and amused by their epicene, Grecian Hal—she had about an inch in height on him, and four in breadth of shoulder, even making allowances for those scalloped sleeves. He wasn't sure he approved, exactly, but this certainly wasn't quite the sort of parish-hall joke he'd expected.

'And this is Peter Warren who's—'

'Julian, dear boy, I'm _everybody_ —oh, _hullo_. Are you our last-minute sparks?'

'Mm.'

'Yes, I thought you had the look of a specialist.'

'Strictly amateur.'

'Strictly— _I'd_ say. It's sort of my professional line, but I've got too many parts to play, they couldn't spare me. By the way, call me Bunny. Only Julian doesn't, the dear stiff thing—'

'Ralph Lanyon.'

'Pleased to meet you.' 

Ralph suppressed a wince attributable to generations of Lanyon squirearchy. 'How do you do?'

'Where's Mick, do you know?'

'Puking in the lav,' Emma Deacon said cheerfully. 'But he'll be fine. Nervous types always are: he'll be down there till the last minute and then come up and simply barnstorm, you wait. Our Hotspur,' she added for Ralph's benefit. 'Here, Bunny, make yourself useful and show Ralph the rig, will you?'

The sound and lighting script was so simple that Ralph found himself able to watch the first two scenes with the ease of a paying punter; the acting so good that he had to remind himself he was not one, and recall himself to his duty. Julian was unrecognisable as King Henry, weighed by responsibility and guilt; the fellow they had as Falstaff, in addition to looking the part, was a solid comedian who picked up his cues with practised snap; Bunny's Poins— _no acting required_. He had never imagined that a woman could play Hal, but Colonna was something close to the Prince of his imagination: forcible, rather dogmatic and intolerant in a decent, humorous way. At _Redeeming time when men least think I will_ Ralph choked on the lump in his throat, and was a few seconds tardy in bringing down the lights so that the throne could be manoeuvred back on. Embarrassed, he applied himself earnestly to the desk for the opening of the third scene, seeing the actors, even Julian's formidable stage presence, as mere properties, shapes in a composition. So the voice, when it came, hit him with the whiplash of a bent foil let go:

> My liege, I did deny no prisoners.  
>  But I remember, when the fight was done,  
>  When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,  
>  Came there a certain lord, neat, and trimly dress'd,  
>  Fresh as a bridegroom...

Ralph had a good memory for faces, but this face had changed sufficiently in five years, accumulating the heft of plausible cynicism such that, further distorted by stage make-up, it was beyond his certain capacity to recognise. But the voice was unmistakable. It was the the voice that had broken into his ear and under his weight. It was the voice that had made the mendacious confession to Jepson; it was not the voice that had cried out _oh please, Lanyon, please_ that first, and achingly sweet time in the prop-room. Self-excuse rushed to fill the cold vacancy that seemed to open in his skull— _I was no more than a boy myself_ —but he had not been a boy. The voice he had then was that which he had now: a mid-range baritone with native Norfolk too scrupulously clipped out for ingratiatingly democratic recovery. The body he had then was that which he had now—rather stouter if anything, fed on school stodge and exercised by school games. And he had something then that he did not have now: the freedom to beat another person not just without fear of an assault charge, but with the entire sanction and approval of their incarcerating institution. 

He tasted bile in his throat and swallowed frantically. His hands worked mechanically across the desk as appreciative, astonished applause and murmurs rose for the end of Act One. Four more acts yawned before him: Hotspur with his wife, with Glendower, with Douglas, with Hal. His instinctive reaction to calamity being empiricism, Ralph assessed the sightlines of the hall and the brightness of the luminaires: it was unlikely that he could be identified from the stage by anyone with less than pretty much perfect vision—Hazell, he knew, had been slightly myopic even at fourteen.  He knew too how completely Hazell went to pieces if he was in the least unnerved, and absurdly, he did not want _that_ Hotspur spoiled, even for a hundred and fifty gape-chapped yokels.  How easy it was to come in roaring and keep on roaring until one expired mid-roar: all an actor needed for that was linctus. Hazell played him incoherent, driven, neurotic: laden with too much responsibility too young, springing into hasty reaction as the result of a torsion wholly insupportable.   

At the interval Alec bounded over to the desk expressing amazement at the general watchability of the entertainment and (largely deserved) deprecation of his sister’s demure performance. 

‘—I say, you look rather frightfully peaky.  Are you all right?’

Ralph explained.

‘You don’t propose actually to acknowledge the little crap, do you?’ 

‘I don’t mean to creep out of it, and giving him the cut would cause a stir for Emma. I don’t see what choice I’ve got.’ 

‘Ems doesn’t care about that sort of thing.’

‘She’s still got to live here. And teach to boot. You don’t know what it’s like.’ 

Alec, having grown up in the London townhouse which his father had sold in order to retire to the healthier air of Gloucestershire in the year he went up to Oxford, conceded his relative inexperience in point of rural mores. (Lynchwyck now proving too rank and bosky for his lungs, the old man was overwintering in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.)

‘Very well. I’ll meet you afterwards in the Crown, shall I? There’s tea and biscuits laid on in the annex. I don’t suppose you want—’ 

‘ _No_.’

Nearly overwhelmed again when he recognised Hotspur and Hal’s single combat as the épée sequences he had worked out for Treviss (who fenced only foil) to teach his _Hamlet_ infants—Christ, Hazell could have hardly taken his eye off Odell for a _moment_ ; it was step-perfect—Ralph nonetheless survived to the curtain call, at which Hazell appeared in a carefully arranged attitude of vague surprise.  Stunned by the palm-scorching intensity of the applause, the stamping and yelling, Ralph almost forgot to put _God Save The King_ on the gramophone.  Glancing over the audience he found himself struck, as he almost never was, by a female profile. Intelligent and well-moulded, comically self-aware of the ridiculousness of its eyes-front rigidity, it belonged to a chestnut-haired woman in her thirties, the sort he liked for their open scorn of specious lines of chat, and with whom he could consequently never start a conversation.  

Emma, a silent spear-carrier for the second half of the play, had charged herself, in her practical fashion, with clearing audience dawdlers into the annex or the street.  She emerged before the others from backstage with the uncertain look, ready to anticipate and deflect congratulation, of one who knows herself weakest of a group effort.

‘Well done, my dear. Nice work.’

‘Thank you. It _wasn’t_ too ghastly, was it?  Oh, leave that.  The hall’s only wanted for Sunday School tomorrow, and I think they’ll be rather thrilled by the paraphernalia.  Julian and Bunny'll do a proper get-out in the afternoon. Where’s Alec?’

‘Outside, smoking, like the grubby cornerboy he is.  I think he’s going straight up to the Crown.’ He quelled a shudder at the thought of finding himself in the same countrified lounge bar as Hazell. ‘Let me stack those—’  

Others of the cast straggled out with exuberant exclamations of amazement that it was all over, farewells, promises to treat one another to drinks.  Julian, still wearing half his costume and most of his leprous makeup, absorbed ecstatic praise and dispensed thanks with the same gentlemanly abstractedness, then made his excuses, leaving through the side-door instead of the front.

‘He has a _mother_ ,’ Emma remarked in response to Ralph’s enquiring look.

‘Aged and frail?’ 

‘Not exactly—Good Lord, you three, _whatever_ were you doing back there—no, don’t answer that.’  

Colonna, maintaining an extraordinary detachment from her companions, considering one's left arm was slung round her neck and the other's right about her waist, made a cheerfully non-committal noise.

‘Oh,’ Emma said, ‘Michael—you haven’t met Ralph L—’

Ralph straightened and turned from the last stack of chairs. Hazell disengaged himself from Colonna and stepped forward. He had the thin skin typical of redheads, that bled too easily and showed sooner than others the marks of pain and fatigue, and which now turned extremely, sensationally white. But it was he, and not Ralph, who spoke, hard and bright, into air suddenly thick with tense disquiet.

‘I have, as a matter of fact.  We were at school—well, _together_ is putting it a touch high. I was a fearful little fourth-form scug when Lanyon was one of the demi-gods of the Sixth. I don’t suppose you remember me, do you? Michael Hazell—’  He put out a hand.

Ralph just stood there, feeling a murderous revulsion he had thought overcome. He could easily have killed him, as long as he hadn't to touch him. Then someone dropped a grey gauze veil over his head, and a tinny cockerel crow sounded down a long, empty corridor: _how do you do?_

He came round to dusty floorboards spotted with half-a-dozen drawing pins and a low contralto hum: _I heard the voice of Jesus say—_    

He said ‘Mama?’ quite distinctly, and achieving slow recollection of where he was, cringed for it. Then the deep female voice—

‘Sit up _slowly_ , otherwise you’ll black out again—’

Prince Hal was holding his wrist. Everyone else seemed to have gone. Her hand was callused and cool. 

‘Feeling better?’

‘Couldn’t possibly be lousier, thanks.’

Colonna, squatting on her heels, grinned and stood up. ‘You were out for about three minutes. That happen to you often?’

‘Never before.’

‘You’re in the Navy, aren’t you?’

‘No. Merchant service.’

‘Oh. Benzedrine aboard and blind ashore?’

‘We're sometimes shorthanded, yes.’

‘Just judging from your dead weight—’ she said in a light pastiche of professional opinion, ‘you’re about a stone less than the least you ought to be for your height and build. Rather irregular pulse, as well—’

‘I know.’

‘It’s probably nothing to worry about. I'd say see your medical officer, except you—' 

'I _am_ my medical officer.' 

'Why doesn't that surprise me? Cobbler's children we. Have you a maiden aunt who’ll take you for appalling meals in country hotels and feed you wedges of Dundee cake?’

‘No. No family at all.’

‘Lucky you. But you should eat,' she dropped into stage-Seven-Dials, 'reg'lar and 'earty-like. And watch it with the benzedrine. Oh, Emma, you’re an angel.  Here. Hot, sweet and thoroughly nasty.’ She handed Ralph a cup of tea and withdrew a hipflask from the inside pocket of her heathery, man-tailored tweed coat.

*

When Emma, tactfully declaring herself exhausted, had gone to bed, Ralph locked the door of the study-sitting room and laid reckless siege to the cordial but carious détente that had existed between him and Alec since their split six months before.  

Afterwards he sprawled on his back, naked and purring before the incandescent coals; Alec, who had almost immediately put on shirt and trousers again, sat in the fireside armchair, smoking a cigarette. He nudged the hollow behind Ralph’s collarbone with a long, prehensile toe.

‘You look like a Tuke.’ 

‘A what? Sounds like something one has the morning after. Or goes to the clinic for.’

‘Henry Scott Tuke. Painter. Bit of a decorator—lightfoot lads and tall ships.  Very much your sort of thing, in fact.  You know, late Victorian kitsch.’

Ralph made a lazily obscene gesture, then rolled over, propping his chin on his fists, his face blurred with concern.  ‘No second thoughts?’

‘More laying a shade, don’t you think, my dear?’

Ralph groaned.  ‘I don’t know what— _bloody_ shy-making. I gave myself a bit of a sickener.’

‘How’d you mean?’ 

‘Hazell. Suddenly realised myself the sort to—well, to involve a minor.’

‘ _Stuff_ , Ralph. It was at school. And you said you were sure of him.’

‘Oh, I was. Still am, for that matter: you should have seen him frisk out of the dressing room arm-in-arm with that massive _tribade_ —’

‘Rather not, on the whole. Emma’s fond of her. She seems all right.’

‘Very sound, as it happens. But—’ Ralph wriggled his shoulders in inarticulate disgust. 

‘Quite. Anyway, Hazell, and all that—’

‘But there’s nothing to say. Just that I deserved what I got.’

‘You put a lot on yourself, dear.  There were plenty—at my filthy conventional place, anyway—who did far worse, actually forced the younger boys, and got away with it.  Have a brandy, do.’  Alec leapt up and busied himself at the drinks cabinet.

‘You don't have to hold someone down to force him. He couldn’t refuse me—' 

‘If he had said no, would you have laid off?’

‘Of course—’

‘Well then, for _Christ’s_ sake. Here. You’ve got awfully thin.’

‘He didn’t know that. I might have made his life a hell for saying it.’

'The mind is its own place and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell—' 

' _Don't_ —that thing in him made it all the worse—I mean, don't you see? He was helpless.' 

‘Oh Ralph—I can think of better things to do with the last proper night of your leave than exercise your outsize Dissenting conscience.’

‘I’m C. of E. Sling me that shirt.’

‘I didn’t mean baptismal affiliation, darling.  Of course it would have been better for both of you if you hadn’t fucked the little brute. But his life was already hell—you could only have made it easier. You forget how well I know you: you haven't it in you not to be useful to people. It sounds as if he's turned out a fairly banal and bitchy queer, neither better nor worse than he ought to be. And you—well, you took what came to you with less complaint than I should have thought possible in rational man.’

Ralph shrugged on his shirt and held out his hand. ‘Smalls and trousers.’

Alec handed over the clothes. ‘Ugh. I never realise you’ve given me an order until afterwards.’

‘I couldn't say the same.' Ralph smiled fleetingly, privately. 'No, listen. I buggered a small boy whose voice hadn’t settled, Alec.  Don’t tell me I was a boy too, because I wasn’t—I was eighteen. Call-up age.’ 

Alec sighed and folded his lanky person back into the chair, blindly patting the coffee table beside him for his cigarette case. ‘Well, _there_ ’s a thing. Will you be satisfied then?  The balloon goes up before the end of the year—probably before the middle of it. And we’re the ballast.’

‘Can’t come fucking soon enough, as far as I'm concerned.’  

‘Bloody hell, you mean it, don’t you? I haven’t seen you look so avid for—well, for about half an hour, actually.  But—’

Ralph extended an exasperated gesture from his fly buttons.‘Your fags are on the bookshelf. Third one along, second down. I’ve come to think I’ve never been good for much else. Our kind isn’t, or shouldn’t be.’ 

‘ _Charmed_ , I’m sure.’  Alec got up and picked up the cigarette case, opened it, closed it again and stowed it in his pocket.

Ralph scowled. ‘You know what I mean—medicine’s just the inverse of it.’

‘Oh, spare me the sodding Sacred Band routine, Ralph. It’s _deranged_. You’ll never get me to agree that we have to purchase with licensed murder the liberty to fuck other consenting adults, so don’t even _try_ —shit, shit, _shit_.’ Alec punched his left palm. ‘I’m sorry.  That sounded most monstrously _pointed_ , and it wasn’t—’

‘’S all right.’  Ralph picked up his glass from the floor and perched on the edge of the sofa. He drained it in a deliberately vulgar waste of a very fair Armagnac.  ‘Come to bed with me. Let’s get all our second thoughts out of the way in one go.’

Alec screwed his eyes shut and shook his head. ‘Yes. Yes.  All right then. Let’s.’

*

Alec’s letters were as irregular as they were entertaining, but there was usually at least one thick budget of plain, looping legibility awaiting Ralph when he came ashore.  Alec had a gift to slip news of moment, especially if sensitive, between scabrous apocrypha and inconsequential gossip, so that it hardly registered until its power to induce a painful memory was gone.  

> This over-emphatic latest from Pa’s cook-daily via Ems, so be yourself the judge of its veracity—the handsome young man who was so very good in that terrible high-class play has got himself an agent [euph.—A.D.] Irish fellow called Porridge Finnan-Haddock or something equally unlikely, and gone out to America, Hollywood, would you believe. Julian Fleming, meanwhile, is engaged to that lady GP, eleven years older, and she looks all twenty of them—redheads never age well— 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Some stretching of timelines (and probability) has gone on in order to get all the personnel roughly in the same place at the same time: nothing too egregious, I hope. Like 'Rare Accidents', this is probably best thought of taking place in a slight AU to all three canonical novels.


End file.
